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REVERSES NEEDED 



DISCOUKSE 



DELIVERED ON THE 



^uiik]j after i\}t |Hsastcr of §u(l ^uii, 



IN THE 



NORTH CHURCH, HARTFORD. 



BY 

HORACE BUSH NELL 



HARTFORD : 
L . E . HUNT 

1861. 



lb 






Hartford, August 2d, 18G1. 
Rev. Dr. BusuNELL, 

Dear Sir: 

Believing that your Sermon, preached in the North 
Church last Lord's day morning, should be more widely considered, we 
respectfully ask of you a copy for publication. 

And are yours most respectfully, 

JOHN L. BUNCE, 
CHAKLES HOSMER, 
H. K. W. WELCH, 
C. N. SHIPMAN, 
HENRY C. ROBINSON. 



Hartford, August 5th, 1861. 
Messrs. J. L. Buxce, Charles Hosmer, H. K. W. AVelcti, C. N. 
Shipmax, Henry C. Roclnson, 

Gentlemen : 

The Discourse referred to in your 
note is readily submitted to the use of the public. 

INIost respectfully yours, 

HORACE BUSHNELL. 



1 



REVERSES NEEDED. 



PROVERBS 24 : 10. 

IF THOU FAINT IN THE DAT OF ADVERSITY, THY STRENGTH IS SMALL. 

Adversity kills only where there is weakness to be tilled. 
Real vigor is at once tested and fed by it ; seen to be great as 
the adversity mastered is great, and also to be made great 
by the mastering. This, too, is the common feeling of man- 
kind, for thus only comes it to be a proverb or current 
maxim. And the proverb holds good of all sorts of strength, 
that of the muscles and that of the nerves, that which lies 
in resolution and that which comes by faith in God, that 
which is moral and that which is religious, that which is 
personal and that which is national, that which belongs to 
civil administration and that which pertains to the deeds of 
arms. Small is the strength, anywhere and everywhere, 
that can not stand adversity, and small will it stay, and 
smaller will it grow, to the end. 

The last Sabbath morning, when you were assembled 
here in the sacred quiet of worship, the patriot soldiers of 
your army, that to which you had contributed your sons, 
your fellow citizens, and your money ; that whose prepara- 
tions and advances you had watched with exulting confidence 
and with expectation eager as the love you bore to your dear 
country itself, were being joined in battle with its enemies ; 



6 

thus to have their terrible worship in the day-long sacrifice 
of blood, before the belching cannon of the foe, and among 
their charging hosts of cavalry, on a field that was itself 
their enemy. If it was unnecessary, it is much to be regret- 
ted that the battle should have been given upon that day ; 
but if it was necessary, then I know not any cause more 
worthy of the day, or any offering that could be deeper in 
sacrifice, or, in fact, more dutiful to God. The tidings of 
the evening came, and it was so far victory. Many were 
exultant, but some of us lay down that night oppressed with 
dreadful forebodings. In the news of the morning it was 
defeat and flight and carnage and loss. Our fine army was 
gone, our hopes were dashed, our hearts sunk down strug- 
gling as it were in an agony, and our fancy broke loose in 
the imagination of innumerable perils. We imagined the 
enemy rushing back on Harper's Ferry and across into 
Maryland, or down upon the Potomac to cut off the passage 
of the river^ then upon the great fortress of the Chesapeake, 
to drive in that portion of the army and beleaguer the for- 
tress. "We imagined also a political reaction, a difficulty of 
obtaining recruits, a loss of credit and means for the war in 
the money market, the probable interference with our block- 
ade by France and England, and finally a general outbreak 
of factiousness and disorder, amounting to a disorganization 
of the government. At any rate the struggle must be 
indefinitely protracted, and the public burdens and distresses 
indefinitely increased. 

These first apprehensions are already quieted, in part. 
The loss turns out to be less than was feared, the retreat to 
be less completely a flight. The enemy are quite as much 
crippled as we. And what is more, a great deal, to our 
feeling and our future energy, we have the grand satisfaction 
of knowing that our soldiers fought the day out in prodigies 



ol" valor almost unexampled. Defeat is on us, therefore, 
but not dishonor; nothing has occurred to weaken us, but 
examples have been set to inspire us rather in all the future 
struggle. Let us thank God for this and count it the full 
half of a victory. Let us also thank God for what is already- 
made clear, that our spirit as a people is not quelled, but 
that we find ourselves beginning, at once, to meet our 
adversity with a steady and stout resolve, pushing forward 
new regiments and preparing to double the army already 
raised. The flash feeling is over, the nonsense bubble of 
proud expectation is burst, but the fire of duty burns only 
the more intensely, and the determination of sacrifice is as 
much more firmly set as it is more rationally made. The 
government also is more instructed than it could be without 
this disaster, and is bracing itself to its work with tenfold 
energy. The army also has a new leader, in whose conduct 
we may rest with more implicit confidence. So that in the 
future, our chances of defeat are really many times fewer 
than they were, or even could have been before, when it 
seemed to be so very certain that we could not fail. Our 
adversity, since we began to bear it, is already increasing our 
strength. 

What is now to be done it is not for me to show ; that be- 
longs to the Government. I will only say that some things 
are to be done by us, that belong to our duty as good citi- 
zens. We are not, as good citizens for example, to busy our- 
selves overmuch in finding who is to blame, and scolding one 
party or another in the administration of the government, 
or the army. Nothing will more fatally break down our 
confidence, or chill our enthusiasm. One thing at least is 
clear, that the government must govern. And if some mis- 
takes have been made, in what great cause have they not? 
There may be some incompetent persons in the government 



and the officering of the army, but infallible competency — 
where has it been found ? Besides the mistakes have been 
discovered and the incompetent men are in a way to be 
weeded out of their places. We want no more a driving 
force outside of the government, to press it forward when it 
is not ready; no more a guiding force to thrust external 
judgments in upon its plans. To speak more plainly still, 
we want no newspaper government, and least of all a news- 
paper army. A pasteboard government, or pasteboard army, 
were just as much better as it is less noisy and less capable 
of mischief. Let the government govern, and the army 
fight, and let both have their own counsel, disturbed and 
thrown out of balance by no gusty conceit, or irresponsible 
and fanatical clamor. 

But the main point for us now is to get ourselves ready 
for the grand struggle we are in, by duly conceiving the 
meaning of it, and receiving those settled convictions that 
will stay by us in all the changing moods we are to pass, and 
the discouragements we are to encounter. This immense 
enthusiasm, bursting forth spontaneous, in a day, and fusing 
us into a complete unity — how great and thrilling a surprise 
has it been to us! I know of nothing in the whole compass 
of human history at all comparable to it in sublimity. It 
verily seems to be, in some sense, an inspiration of God ; and 
it is even difficult to shut away the suggestion that innumer- 
able sacrifices and prayers laid up for us by the patriot fath- 
ers of the past ages, were being mixed in now with our feel- 
ing, and, by God's will, heaving now in our bosom. See, 
we have been saying, what an immense loyalty there is in 
our people ! how the simple sight of our flag kindles a fire in 
us that was never kindled by any grandest impersonation of 
heroism and historic royalty ! It is even so, and we thank 
God for the revelation ; but this loyalty is no fixed fact, it 



9 

becomes us to know, as long as it only fires our passion. It 
must get hold of our solid convictions, and burn itself 
through into our moral nature itself, in order to become 
reliable and sure. It must be struck in by sacrifice, drilled 
into the very bone of our substance, by persistent struggles 
with adversity, and then it will stand, then it is loyalty com- 
plete. To sail out gaily in a breeze, singing patriotic songs, 
is a good enough beginning of the voyage, but a hurricane 
or two, or only a bad leak discovered, will take all that away, 
and then a good steerage at the helm, and a true compass, 
and a sturdy, stout resolve, kept up through long watchings 
and exhaustive labors — that only will at last bring in the ship. 
What I wish then more especially, on the present occasion, 
is, to speak, not to impulse, but to conviction, not to cry 
"forward," "forward to Richmond" or forward to some 
other where beyond — Key West, or Magellan, — but to go 
over a calm revision of the matter of the war itself, showing 
what it means and the great moral and religious ideas that 
are struggling to the birth in it — possible to be duly born 
only in great throes of adversity and sacrifice. 

It is a remarkable, but very serious fact, not sufficiently 
noted, as far as my observation extends, that our grand revo- 
lutionary fathers left us the legacy of this war, in the ambi- 
guities of thought and principle which they suffered, in 
respect to the foundations of government itself. The real fact 
is that, without proposing it, or being distinctly conscious of 
it, they organized a government, such as we, at least, have 
understood to be without moral or religious ideas ; in one 
view a merely man-made compact, that without something 
farther, which in fact was omitted or philosophically exclu- 
ded, could never have more than a semblance of authority. 

More it has actually had, because oiir nature itself has been 
2 



10 

wiser, and deeper, and closer to God, than our political doc- 
trines; but we have been gradually wearing our nature down 
to the level of our doctrines ; breeding out, so to speak, the 
sentiments in it that took hold of authority, till at last, we 
have brought ourselves down as closely as may be, to the 
dissolution of all nationality and all ties of order. Hence 
the war. It has come just as soon as we made it necessary, 
and not a day sooner. And it will stay on to the end of our 
history itself, unless the mistake we have suffered is, at least, 
practically rectified. We have never been a properly loyal 
people ; we are not so now, save in the mere feeling, or flame 
of the hour. Our habit has been too much a habit of disre- 
spect, not to persons only, but to law. Government, we say, 
or have been saying, is only what we make ourselves, there- 
fore we are at least upon a level with it ; we too, made the 
nationality, and can we not as well unmake it? 

That we may duly understand this matter, go back a 
moment to the Revolution, and trace the two very distinct, 
yet, in a certain superficial sense, agreeing elements, that 
entered into it. First, there was what, for distinction's 
sake, we may call the historic element, represented, more 
especially, by the New England people. The political ideas 
were shaped by religion — so far church ideas. The church, 
for example, was a brotherhood ; out of that grew historic- 
ally the notions of political equality in the state. Govern- 
ment also was conceived to be for the governed, just as the 
church was for the members ; and both were God's insti- 
tutes — ordinances of God. The major vote in both, was 
only the way of designating rulers, not the source of their 
sovereignty or spring of their authority. Designated by us, 
their investiture was from God, the only spring of authority. 
Their text for elective government was the same that our 
Hartford Hooker used, when preaching, in 1638, for the 



11 

Convention which framed our Constitution — the first consti- 
tution of the new world, and type of all the others that 
came after, even that of the nation itself — " Take you wise 
men, and understanding, and known among your tribes, and 
I will make them rulers over you." God was to be the head 
of authority, and the rulers were to have their authority 
from Him. Such was the historic training that preceded 
and prepared this wing of the revolution. 

The other wing was prepared by sentiments wholly differ- 
ent ; such, for example, as are sufficiently well represented 
in the life and immense public influence of Mr. Jefferson ; a 
man who taught abstractively, not religiously, and led the 
unreligious mind of the time by his abstractions. It was 
not his way to deal in moral ideas of any kind. Familiar 
with the writings of Rousseau and the generally infidel lit- 
erature of the French nation, his mind was, to say the least, 
so far dominated by them, as to work entirely in their molds. 
He had no conception of any difficulty in making a com- 
plete government for the political state by mere human 
composition ; following Rousseau's theory, which discovers 
the foundation of all government in a "social compact." 
Going never higher than man, or back of man, he supposed 
that man could somehow create authority over man ; that a 
machine could be got up by the consent of the governed 
that would really oblige, or bind their consent ; not staying 
even to observe that the moment any thing binds, or takes 
hold of the moral nature, it rules by force of a moral idea, 
and touches, by the supposition, some throne of order and 
law above the range of mere humanity. Covered in by this 
immense oversight, he falls back on the philosophic, abstract- 
ive contemplation of men, and finding them all so many 
original monads with nothing historic in them as yet, he 
says, are they not all equal ? Taking the men thus to be 



12 

inherently equal in their natural prerogatives and rights, he 
asks their consent, makes the compact, and that is to be the 
grand political liberty of the world. 

But the two great wings thus described can agree, you 
will see, in many things, only saying them always in a dif- 
ferent sense ; one in a historic, the other in an abstractive, 
theoretic sense ; one in a religious, and the other in an 
atheistic ; both looking after consent and the major vote, 
both going for equality, both wanting Articles of Agreement, 
and finally both a Constitution. And the result is, that in 
the consent, in the major vote, in the equality, in the Arti- 
cles of Agreement, in the Constitution, Christianity, in its 
solid and historic verity, as embodied in the life of a people, 
joins hands, so to speak, with what have been called, though 
in a different view, the '^glittering generalities" of Mr. Jef- 
ferson. Thus in drawing the Declaration of Independence, 
he puts in, by courtesy, the recognition of a Creator and 
creation, following on with his " self-evident truths," such as 
that "all men are created equal," and that "governments 
derive their just powers from the consent of the governed;" 
in which, too, the other wing of the revolution can well 
enough agree, only they will take them, not as abstractions, 
but in a sense that is qualified and shaped by their history. 
They had nothing to do with some theoretic equality in man 
before government, in which, as a first truth of nature, gov- 
ernments are grounded. They were born into government, 
and they even believed in a certain sacred equality under it, 
as their personal right. They had also elected their rulers, 
and so far they could agree to the right of a government by 
consent, but they never had assumed that men are ipso facto 
exempt from obligation who have not consented, or that an 
autocratic and princely government is of necessity void and 
without "just power." Their "equality," their "consent," 



13 

were the divine right of their history, from the landing of 
the fathers downward, and before the French encyclopedists 
were born. 

You will thus perceive that two distinct, or widely differ- 
ent constitutional elements entered into our political order 
at the beginning; that, agreeing in forms of words, they 
were yet about as really not in agreement, and have, in fact, 
been struggling in the womb of it, like Jacob and Esau, from 
the first day until now. 

We have not always been conscious of the fact, yet so it 
has been. On one side, we have had the sense of a historic, 
and morally binding authority, freedom sanctified by law 
and law by God himself, living, as it were, in a common, all- 
dominating nationality ; fortified and crowned by moral ideas. 
On the other, we have not so much been obeying as specu- 
lating, drawing out our theories from points back of all 
history — theories of compacts, consentings, reserved rights, 
sovereignties of the people and the like — till filially we have 
speculated almost every thing away, and find that actually 
nothing is left us, but to fight out the question whether we 
shall have a nationality or not; whether we shall go to 
pieces in the godless platitudes, or stand fast and live under 
laws and institutions sanctified by a Providential history. 
Proximately our whole difficulty is an issue forced by slavery ; 
but if we go back to the deepest root of the trouble, we shall 
find that it comes of trying to maintain a government without 
moral ideas, and concentrate a loyal feeling around institu- 
tions that, as many reason, are only human compacts, en- 
titled of course, if that be all, to no feeling of authority, or 
even of respect. 

I have spoken thus of Mr. Jefierson and of his opinions, 
not as invoking the old party prejudice against him, long ago 
buried ; I join no issue with his reputed infidelity ; I only 



14 

charge that he brought in modes of thought and philosophy, 
as regards political matters, that we are none the less bitterly 
pernicious that they were patriotically meant, and gained a 
currency for them that has made them even identical, as 
thousands really conceive, with our institutions themselves. 

Glance along down the track of our history, now, and see 
how they have been letting us regularly down towards the 
present disruption of order ; how the moral ideas that con- 
stitute the only real basis of government — of ours as of all 
others — are ignored, omitted, or quite frittered away by their 
action. 

Our statesmen, or politicians, not being generally religious 
men, take up with difficulty conceptions of government, or 
the foundations of government, that suppose the higher rule 
of God. They are not atheists, but such modes of thought 
are not in their plane. When they hear it affirmed that 
" the powers that be are ordained of God," they think it 
may be very good in the New Testament and the ministers 
and pious people to compliment their religion by such a 
tribute, but their scripture notion appears to be forced and 
far fetched. It signifies nothing in the way of qualifying 
such an impression, that every human soul is configured to 
civil, as to parental, authority, bowing to any government 
actually existing, autocratic, or elective, with a felt obliga- 
tion, when it rules well. As little does it signify that God, 
as certainly as there is a God, dominates in all history, build- 
ing all societies into forms of order and law, and that, when 
constitutions are framed by men, they were as really framed 
by God, the Grand Universal Protector of society, and are 
nothing, in fact, but the issuing into form of a government 
that He before implanted in the social orders and historic ideas 
of the people ; possible therefore to be framed and to hold 



15 

the binding force of laws, because God Himself has prepared 
them, and stamped them with his own providential sover- 
eignty. Sometimes too, the politicians are a little annoyed, 
as we may see, by this foisting in of the claims of religion. 
What has religion to do with political matters ? What has 
the church to do with the state ? As if the state wore really 
outside of God's prerogative and he had nothing to do with 
it ! — nothing to do with the marshalling and well ordering 
and protecting rule of society ! 

So they fall off easily into the " glittering generalities," 
and begin to theorize about compacts, consentings, and the 
like, building up our governmental order from below. First 
of all they clear the ground by a sweeping denial ; rejoicing 
in the discovery that all claims of divine right in government 
are preposterous. If they only meant by this that all claims 
to govern wrong by divine right are a baseless and dreadful 
hypocrisy, it would be well ; but they really conceive that 
government is now to rule without any divine right at all ; as 
if there were any such thing as a right that is liot divine 
right, and has not God's eternal sanctions going with it ; any 
such thing as authority in law that is not centered in God, 
and pronounced in the moral nature by Him. 

They do not perceive that God is joined to all right, and 
all defences of right in society, by the eternal necessity of 
his nature — stands by them, makes them his own, clothes 
them with His own everlasting authority ; hence that all law 
gets the binding force of law. 

But the ground is clear — religion is one thing, government 
is another — and now tliere is nothing to do but to find how 
man can make, or does make a government without God, or 
any divine sanction. Well, man is the fact given, govern- 
ment the problem. And the man being a complete individual, 
independent and sole arbiter of his own actions, and exactly 



16 

equal, so far at least, to every other, he may choose, if he 
please, never to have any government at all. But he con- 
sents, and there government begins. He surrenders a part of 
his own rights, and what he surrenders goes to make the 
government. The government is, of course, a compact. The 
major vote chooses the rulers, and the people are the sover- 
eign head whence all law and authority emanate. To them 
only the rulers are responsible, being in fact their agents, 
administering a trust for them. And this, it is conceived, is a 
true account of civil government — our own constitutional 
government. 

These now are the saws of our current political philosophy, 
figuring always in the speeches and political speculations of 
our statesmen, from the Revolution downward. They could 
many of them be true enough were they qualified so as to let 
in God and religion, or so as to meet and duly recognize the 
moral ideas of history ; but, taken as they are meant, they are 
about the shallowest, chaifiest fictions ever accepted by a 
people, as" the just account of their laws. 

Let there be no misunderstanding here ; I am not com- 
plaining of the laws or the constitutions ; better and more 
beneficent never existed. I am only complaining of the ac- 
count that is made of them, the philosophy that is given of 
their grounds and underlying principles. They represent, in 
fact, our history, moral and religious ; never in any sense the 
false reasons, by which we strip them of their sanctity. 

There was never, in the first place, any such prior man, or 
body of men, to make a government. We are born into gov- 
ernment as we are into the atmosphere, and when we assume 
to make a government or constitution, we only draw out one 
that was providentially in us before. We could not have a 
king, or a nobility, for example, in this country ; for there 
was no material given out of which to make either one cr the 



17 

other. The church life and order was democratic too. The 
whole English constitution also, was in us before. In these 
facts, prepared in history by God, our institutions lie. We 
did not make them. We only sketched them, and God put 
them in us to be sketched. And when that is done they are 
His, clothed with His divine sanction as the Founder and 
Protector of States. 

Again, neither we nor any other people ever made a civil 
compact, except as it was virtually made by God before ; never 
surrendered a part of our natural self government to endow 
the government of the State. We never had, in fact, any 
one right of a government to surrender. What human being 
ever had, or by any conceivable method could have, as being 
simply a man, the riglit to legislate, or to punish, or to make 
war, or to levy taxes, or to enforce contracts and the payment 
of debts, or to summon witnesses ? On the contrary we go 
into the civil state for nothing but to get our rights, and have 
them secured — all the rights we have. 

So of what is called the inherent, natural right of self- 
government in a state, and the right of a government by the 
major vote. Is it so that no great people of the world ever 
had a lawful, or legitimate right to rule but our own ? And 
how constantly, when we say it, does the sense of some pre- 
posterous assumption creep over the mind of every ordinarily 
sensible man, raising the suspicion that after all, the institu- 
tions of his country are hollow and baseless — even as the 
theory given to account for them, is plainly seen to be. 

So again of the popular sovereignty, the natural sover- 
eignty of the people. If we understand ourselves, the 
people are no more sovereign, and have no better right to 
be, than any single ruler has, when ruling in the succession 
of birth, if he only takes his power in the true historic way 
of his country and rules well. The real truth is, after all, 



18 

that our popular vote, or choice, is only one way of desig- 
nating rulers, and the succession of blood another ; both 
equally good and right when the historic order makes them 
so. And then the laws, legitimated by history, and clothed 
in that manner with a divine right, rule over all — over the 
elections, over the successions ; then over the rulers as truly 
as the subjects. 

Meantime, what results but that we get a government, 
under these fictions of theory, which, by the supposition, is 
no government. It is only a copartnership, and has no na- 
tional authority, no obligation. How can a copartnership 
amount to a governing power over the parties in it ? If they 
agree to legislate it does not make them a legislature. What 
are their rulers, but committees, or agents, and what can 
they do that amounts to government, more than the com- 
mittees, agents, directors of a bank ? Their " be it enacted," 
has no force of law, it is only their agreement, or consent, 
which binds nobody, touches no conscience. They get no 
authority till we see them authorized to legislate by God. 
Nothing touches the conscience and becomes morally binding 
that is not from above the mere human level. Laws become 
laws only when there is felt to be some divine right in them, 
some voice of God speaking in them. 

Now in all these schemings of theory, by which we have 
been contriving how to generate, or how we have generated, 
a government without going above humanity, we lose out 
all moral ideas, and take away all tonic forces necessary to 
government. Our merely terrene, almost subterranean, 
always godless fabric, becomes more and more exactly Avhat 
we have taken it to be in our philosophy. The habit of re- 
spect dies out in us, we respect nothing ; authority is more 
and more completely ignored. What authority have laws 
when there is no sovereignty back of them, or in them, but 



19 

that of the people ? The grand, historic, religious element 
is worn away, or supplanted thus, by Avhat we take to be our 
wiser philosophy, and the spirit of loyalty runs down to be a 
mere feeling of attachment, so weak that we are scarcely 
conscious of it, to our mere compacts and man-made sover- 
eignties. 

Meantime our descent is accelerated in the same direction, 
by the demoralizing forces of peace, and unexampled pros- 
perity, and more than all, by the scrambles of party and the 
venal intrigues of political leaders and rulers, till finally we 
reach a state where the government is chiefly valued for what 
can be gotten out of it, by the farming of its revenues, and 
oflSces, and contracts. Reverence to its honor, care for its 
safety, integrity in maintaining it, willingness to make sacri- 
fices for it, all give way and an awful recklessness respecting 
it, or what becomes of it, is visible on every side. 

And again the same descent is accelerated by the essen- 
tially immoral, or unmoral, habit of slavery ; breeding, as it 
does, an imperious, violent, unsubordinated character in the 
minds that are trained in it. They do not live in law, make 
nothing of obligation, or duty, but they grow up into their 
will, into self-assertion, into force and bloody passion, and all 
the murderous barbarities, misnamed chivalry. To be a man 
is to be above obedience, and to speak of duty, conscience, 
obedience to God, is the same thing, whether in young or 
old, as to be a poltroon, or a sneak. And this wild, self- 
willed habit grows worse and worse by continuance ; being 
gradually bred into the stock, as all habits are, and becoming 
a naturally propagated quality ; till finally a people is pro- 
duced, or will be, that are really incapable of law, or sound 
government — unfit to be rulers, incapable of being ruled. 

But the grand crowning mischief is yet to be named. Out 
of these baseless, unhistoric, merely speculated theories of 



20 

the government, and the gradual demoralization of our 
habit under them, a doctrine of state rights is finally to 
emerge and organize the armed treason that explodes our 
nationality. Our political theories never gave us a real 
nationality, but only a copartnership, and the armed treason 
is only the consummated result of our speculations. Where 
nothing exists but a consent, what can be needed to end it 
but a dissent? And if the states are formed by the consent 
of individuals, was not the general government formed by 
consent of the states ? What then have we to do but to give 
up the partnership of the states when we will? If a tariff 
act is passed, displeasing to some states, they may rightfully 
nullify it ; if a president is elected not in the interest of 
slavery they may secede ; that is, withdraw their consent, 
and stand upon their reserved rights. "By nature," says 
Mr. Calhoun, so runs the argument, "every individual has 
the right to govern himself, and governments must derive 
their right from the assent, express or implied, of the gov- 
erned, and subject to such limitations as they may impose." 
* * * " Indeed, according to our theory, gov- 

ernments are, in their nature, but trusts, and those appointed 
to administer them, trustees, or agents, to execute trust 
powers. The sovereignty resides elsewhere, in the people, 
not in the government, and with us the people mean the 
people of the several states." Then of course it follows in 
the exact strain, as any one may see, of our philosophy, or 
cant misnamed philosophy, that the states have a right to 
nullify, or secede at will. And so our brave abstractions that 
we begun with, come to their issue finally in a most brave 
conclusion that is everyway worthy of them. No matter 
that the Constitution asserts in a hundred ways the essential 
and perpetual supremacy of the government. No matter 
that it was given to the states to be ratified, in that way to 



21 

cut off eternally all pretences of sovereignty Hn themselves; 
no matter that more than a full half of the states now exist- 
ing were actually created and organized by the general 
government on its own territory. Neither is it any thing 
that we are landed in the very strange predicament of being 
a people, the only one ever heard of in the world, without a 
nationality. Is the nationality in the states? No, that was 
never so much as thought of. Is it in the general govern- 
ment ? No, that is philosophically denied. And so we are 
left to the luckless condition of being no nation at all, and 
having no nationality anywhere ! We began with a godless 
theorizing, and we end, just as we should, in discovering that 
we have not so much as made any nation at all. We 
scorned this state rights theory at first, but we have been 
bidding many years for the casting vote of the south, and 
selling out the nation to pay, and the doctrine, meantime, 
has been creeping, worm like and silently, into the north, 
till many have began to give in to it, scarcely knowing when 
it arrived. Finally the secession, argued for as a right, 
begins to be planned for as a fact. Even cabinet ministers 
in the government were preparing it more than a year ago, 
as is well ascertained, contriving how to break down the 
credit of the government, how to empty the armories by a 
transfer of arms, how to Avcaken the defences, how to cor- 
rupt the allegiance of the army. And now, at last, the fact 
itself is come, the secession is made — hence the war. 

If now you have followed me in this exposition, you have 
seen how our want of moral ideas, and our commonly 
accepted philosophy of government, coupled with other 
demoralizing and disintegrating influences in our scheme of 
society, both north and south, have been drawing us down 
to this from the first. We have come to the final break and 
disaster, just as soon as we must, not a day sooner. Gravity 



22 

was never surer in the precipitation of a stone, or more 
regular in the downward pull and pressure. 

And what is it now that is arming to assert and establish 
the broken nationality ? Not religion certainly — it does not 
appear that our people are consciously more given to religion 
than they have been — yet, in another view, it is no other 
than the old historic religious element in which our nation- 
ality has been grounded from the first ; that which has been 
smothered and kept under, by the specious fictions we have 
contrived, to account for the government without reference 
to God, or to moral ideas. Yes, it is this old, implicitly, if 
not formally, religious element, that is struggling out again 
now, clad all over in arms, to maintain the falling nationality. 
It looked on the Sumpter flag, the stars and stripes, shot 
through and shot down by traitors, and as it looked, took 
fire. What a wonder is it even to ourselves, to see the blaze 
that is kindled. We call it loyalty — we did not imagine that 
we had it ! What a grand, rich sentiment it is ! See what 
strength it has ! See how it raises common men into heroes ! 
See the bloody baptism wherewith it is able to be baptized, 
and how it pours the regiments on, down the rivers and over 
the mountains, and round the promontories, to hurl their 
bodies against the armed treason ! The mere feeling, the 
passion, if we so choose to call it — is not the bliss of it worth 
even the cost of the war ? What in fact, is more priceless to 
a nation than great sentiments ? So we bless ourselves in 
the loyalty of the hour, and the more that there certainly is 
some latent heat of religion in the blaze of it. 

But more is wanted, and God is pressing us on to the 
apprehending of that for which we are apprehended. Our 
passion must be stiffened and made a fixed sentiment, as it 
can be only when it is penetrated and fastened by moral 



2S 

ideas. And this requires adversity. As the dyers use mor- 
dants to set in their colors, so adversity is the mordant for 
all sentiments of morality. The true loyalty is never 
reached, till the laws and the nation are made to appear 
sacred, or somewhat more than human. And that will not 
be done till we have made long, weary, terrible sacrifices for 
it. Without shedding of blood there is no such grace pre- 
pared. There must be reverses and losses, and times of 
deep concern. There must be tears in the houses, as well 
as blood in the fields ; the fathers and mothers, the wives 
and dear children, coming into the woe, to fight in hard 
bewailings. Desolated fields, prostrations of trade, discour- 
agements of all kinds, must be accepted with unfaltering, 
unsubduable patience. Religion must send up her cry out 
of houses, temples, closets, where faith groans heavily before 
God. In these and all such terrible throes, the true loyalty 
is born. Then the nation emerges, at last, a true nation, 
consecrated and made great in our eyes by the sacrifices it 
has cost ! There is no way ever but just this to make a 
nation great and holy in the feeling of its people. And it 
is never raised, in this manner, till it has fought up some 
great man, or hero, in whom its struggles and victories are 
fitly personated. One really great man or commander we 
certainly have, mercifully preserved to us to be the central- 
izing head of our confidence, and fulfill his sublime charge 
of fatherhood in the conduct of our great affairs. But he 
belongs, in a sense, to the past, and will soon be gone. We 
want another, that belongs more properly to the future, the 
new and great future. And such an one can not be made 
to order, or by any brief holiday campaigning. He must be 
long enough and deep enough in the struggle to be crowned 
as the soldier of Providence. Most deeply do we want such 
a man, a new Washington, only still himself a man of his 



u 

age and time. And if I were a prophet, I would almost 
dare to whisper his name. Expectation goes before, expect- 
ation prophesies. Calling out her soldier son, with blessings 
on his youth, she anoints him beforehand, even as Samuel 
anointed David. This, she says, is the man whom the Lord 
of Hosts will accept. True, these Washingtons are expen- 
sive ; they cost how many sacrifices, how many thousands of 
lives, what rivers of tears and blood and money ! And yet 
they are cheap ! Our old Washington — what would we take 
for him now ? Give us grace, thou God of the land, only 
to deserve and patiently wait, and sturdily fight, for another; 
so for the establishment of our glorious nationality, and 
the everlasting expulsion of those baseless, godless theories 
which our fathers let in to corrupt and filch away the prin- 
ciples of right and law-begirt liberty for which, in fact, they 
bled ! 

But this is war, we shall be told", and war is certainly no 
such moral affair. How then do we expect any such moral 
regeneration to come out of it ? In one view the objection 
is good ; war is a great demoralizer ; throwing back on 
society, men who have been hardened and made desperate, 
often, by the vices and reckless violences of camp life. But 
the same is true of peace ; that also has its dangers and 
corruptions; breeding, finally, all most selfish, unheroic, 
and meanest vices — untoning all noblest energies, making 
little men, and loose, and low ; ignorant of sacrifice, and 
scarcely meaning it, even when they cleave to their virtues. 
Peace will do for angels, but war is God's ordinance for 
sinners, and they want the schooling of it often. In a time 
of war, what a sense of discipline is forced. Here, at least, 
there must be and will be obedience ; and the people, out- 
side, get the sense of it about as truly as the army itself. 
Here, authority towers high, and the stern necessities of the 



25 

field clothe it with honor. Government is here sharpened 
to a cutting edge. All the laxities of feelhig and duty are 
drawn tight. Principles and moral convictions are toned to 
a practical supremacy. Hence the remarkable fact that the 
old Romans were the sternest of all people in their morality. 
The military drill of their perpetual Avarfare brought them 
into the sense of order and law, and the fixed necessity of 
obedience to rule. And so they became the great law-nation 
of the world, producing codes and rescripts that have been 
the stock matter of all the civil codes and tribunals even of 
the modern nations. 

Neither is it any objection that ours is a civil war, how- 
ever much we may seem to be horrified by the thought of it. 
Where a civil war is not a war of factions, but of principles 
and practical ends, it is the very best and most fruitful of all 
wars. The great civil war of Cromwell and Charles, for ex- 
ample, what was it, in fact, but a fighting out of all that is 
most valuable in the British Constitution? And what was 
the result of it, briefly stated, but liberty enthroned and for- 
tified by religion ? And there was never a people more for- 
tunate in the occasions of a civil w'ar than we. Not one 
doubt is permitted us that we are fighting for the right, and 
our adversaries for the wrong ; we to save the best govern- 
ment of the world, and they to destroy it. Whence it fol- 
lows that, as God is with all right and for it, by the fixed 
necessity of his virtue, we may know that we are fighting up 
to God, and not away from Him. And the victory, when it 
comes, will even be a kind of religious crowning of our 
nationality. All the atheistic jargon we have left behind us 
will be gone, and the throne of order, established, will be 
sanctified by moral convictions. What we have fought out, 
by so many and bloody sacrifices, will be hallowed by them 
in our feeling. Our loyalty will be entered into our con- 
4 



26 

science, and the springs of our religious nature. Govern- 
ment now will govern, and will be valued because it does, 
and the feeble platitudes we let in for a philosophy will be 
displaced by the old historic habits and convictions that have 
been the real life of our institutions from the first. 

All this, you will observe by the simple schooling of our 
adversities and without any reform or attempted amend- 
ment of our institutions. Just fighting the war out, into 
victory and established nationality, will be enough. It 
might not be amiss, at some fit time, to insert in the pream- 
ble of our Constitution, a recognition of the fact that the 
authority of government, in every form, is derivable only 
from God ; cutting off, in this manner, the false theories un- 
der which we have been so fatally demoralized. But this is 
no time to agitate or put on foot political reforms of any 
kind ; and I wish it to be distinctly observed, that I am only 
showing what our adversity means, and helping you to bear 
it with a resolute heart, for the good that is in it. 

As to the great and frowning misery of slavery, I know 
not what to say, or how the matter may be issued. A pro- 
found mystery of God hangs over it thus far, and the veil is 
yet to be lifted. We certainly did not undertake this war as 
a crusade against slavery. And yet the supporters of slavery 
may easily create complications that will turn the whole 
struggle down upon it, whether we desire it or not, or even 
when we carefully shun the alternative. This one thing we 
know, that, in a certain other view, the whole stress now of 
the war is against slavery. Simply to be victorious in it, 
leaving the constitutional rights of slavery just as they are, 
will bring its rampant spirit under, take down its defiant 
airs, teach it a compelled respect and modesty, and put a stop 
forever to the disgusting and barbarous propagandism of the 
past. Then it will be open to conviction, and the laws of 



27 

population alone, helped by nothing else, will bring it to a 
full end in less than' fifty years; the best and most merciful 
end, it may be, which the case permits. Thenceforth we are 
a homogeneous universally free people, a solid and compact 
nation, such as God will have us. 

Having such a cause, my friends, with such great hopes 
before us, this one almost glorious reverse that we have met 
will signify little. Adversity will be our strength, disap- 
pointments our arguments. I know not what dark days and 
times of unspeakable trial are before us, but we must be 
ready for any thing, daunted and discouraged by nothing. 
Have we property, let it go — what is property in such a 
cause? Have we husbands, have we sons, put the armor on 
them, and the holy panoply of our prayers, and send them 
to the field. Any thing, that we may have a nationality, and 
a government, and have the true loyalty burnt into the 
hearts of our children. 

Teach us, God, to be worthy of these great hopes; make 
us equal to the glorious calling of thy Providence ; be thou 
God of hosts in our armies; and help us to establish, on 
eternal and right foundations, The Great Republic of the 
future ao;es. 





013 700 444 6 



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444 6 




